Obama Will Be Hands-On Chief

By

Gerald F. Seib

Updated Jan. 13, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

If you want to know where real power will reside in Barack Obama's Washington, consider that his White House staff will include these people:

A former Treasury secretary and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve (Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker, respectively); a man who once ran all allied forces in Europe and another who commanded all American forces in the Pacific (James Jones and Dennis Blair); a woman once in charge of the government's chief environmental agency and a man who spearheaded Democrats' return to power in Congress (Carol Browner and Rahm Emanuel).

There's not a shrinking violet in that bunch, and their presence on President-elect Obama's staff tells you that power will tilt toward the White House, not the cabinet secretaries who tend to get attention during a transition.

As that suggests, we may not yet know the details of Mr. Obama's economic-stimulus plan or his policy toward Iran, but we have learned a lot during the transition about the kind of president he will be and the kind of administration he will run.

The period has been instructive as much for what hasn't been said as for what has been said. Little has been said about "delegating power" or "cabinet government," phrases thrown about in past transitions to suggest decision-making would be decentralized so the president can save his time and brain cells for just a few items.

Instead, it is clear that the center of Barack Obama's administration will be Barack Obama himself. There will be more people with big feet on his White House staff than in an NBA locker room.

Beyond that, he intends to be not just commander in chief but communicator in chief, handling both the substantive and the inspirational messages, taking advantage of new communications technologies, and likely mixing it up with the press more than his predecessor did.

Internally, he will not be at the end of an information pipeline but in the middle of an information grid; his fight against government lawyers and security agencies to keep his own BlackBerry for personal and private messages is more than symbolic. His vice president, Joe Biden, will be neither the all-powerful deputy that Dick Cheney was for the current President Bush, nor the man with specific assignments, as Al Gore and Dan Quayle were for President Clinton and the first President Bush. What role Mr. Biden actually will play is one of the great unanswered questions.

There are, of course, other things we don't yet know about how the 44th president will operate. We don't know whether he will tend toward consulting with, or commanding, his party in Congress. Was his failure to tell key senators about his pending appointment of Leon Panetta to run the Central Intelligence Agency a slip-up or a calculated move not to hear objections? Nor do we know whether his professed desire to work with Republicans will be real and personal, or distant and pro forma.

The most certain aspect of the administration-in-formation is that its White House team will have more high-profile players than any ever assembled. That means Mr. Obama is continuing, and extending, a trend toward concentrating power within the White House -- as opposed to cabinet agencies around Washington -- that has been taking shape for more than half a century.

The first big step down that path came under Franklin Roosevelt, who leaned heavily on a small group of personal advisers as he rammed into place his New Deal programs and fought World War II.

The formalization of that tendency began when the National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council. The NSC began as a committee of cabinet officers involved in national-security matters, but eventually it spawned a single national security adviser and a significant staff, both working directly for the president.

In the Clinton years, a parallel national economic adviser, running a White House-based National Economic Council, was added. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a White House-based director of national intelligence was created to oversee the intelligence community and supplant the director of the CIA as the president's main intelligence adviser.

Now Mr. Obama has added a White House energy and environment czar (Ms. Browner), created a board to oversee economic recovery (Mr. Volcker), and named former Treasury official Nancy Killefer a White House "performance czar" with a mandate to weed out ineffective programs across the government.

The advantage for Mr. Obama is that a staff so populated with experienced figures allows him to exert more control over policy. There also are multiple risks: A proliferation of bosses can blur lines of command, and cabinet secretaries might resent interference from the White House (Hillary Clinton, perhaps?), producing embarrassing power struggles. Also, a White House that seems to be calling the shots can't easily deflect blame when things go badly.

The one thing Mr. Obama's team lacks is an obvious point-player to make good on his pledge to be bipartisan. His cabinet includes one real Republican, Ray LaHood, a second-tier player as transportation secretary; and one nominal Republican, Robert Gates at defense. Retired Gen. Jones, the national security adviser in waiting, has good ties to Republicans, but there's nobody comparable on domestic policy. Perhaps the new team needs one more czar: a "bipartisanship czar."

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